Diigo - Reflection on Literature Review

So far from the articles and papers that I have read, I found all positive experiences with social bookmarking tools. In her blog, Silvia Rosenthal suggests that social bookmarking tools promote skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking.  I tend to agree with her.

 I found mainly three uses of social bookmarking systems in the literature:

• For organizing and managing research collaboratively by group of students in a project by tagging, highlighting and sharing content with each other. The collaborative nature of the social bookmarking tools is ideal for this. This is the same purpose that I intent to use the social bookmarking tool with my students .
• To organize pools of resources related to content teachers are teaching and share it with students
• To organize and manage information gathered by students in a course.
• To search for information in the social bookmarking systems instead of using google or yahoo since content is newer and updated and furthermore, the additional value is added since content is rated and tagged by others. This makes the information of higher quality than that found on the search engines.

The paper lists many applications of Diigo in Universities in USA for teaching and learning. For example in Kansas State University it was used with a class of 200 students to keep track of teaching resources. I found it interesting how Diigo was used for in photojournalism and documentary course. It was used by students to develop collaborative group research projects. Each group project had a tag and all the students in the group added links to it. Then these links were distributed in the classroom and each student had to read selected papers and then develop a summary that was later shared among the other students. In this way, all the class had a global idea of the research issue. It was interesting to see how a group research was not isolated to the group that was conducting the research.

The emphasis on most of the pedagogical approaches in using social bookmarking tools is collaboration or co-construction of knowledge and building understanding.

I am eager to see how students will tag informational resources related to their studies. Although the tagging system is not new to social media but it's use is mainly personal and not for learning. I found Edogrigrami's rubric for social bookmarking useful and plan to adapt it for my course and share it with students. I am not sure how, but I read that there is a diigo account for educators, with which the can create accounts or add students.. I need to explore this option and see how to use it.

If anyone has any experience with Diigo any suggestions or recommendations on how to use it with a class would help. I didn't find anyone planning to use social bookmarking tools in the Moodle discussions. Any other way this will be a lone journey.